Illustrative sample project Systems Setup and Cleanup
Owner capacity
Founder Dependency Audit
Most founders do not set out to be the bottleneck. The business grew, they kept answering every question because they were fastest, and now nothing moves without them. This sample project inventories the decisions, maps who can cover each function, captures the knowledge that lives in one head, and moves decisions down a delegation ladder with written limits.
Brightwater Pool & Spa Service (fictional) · Illustrative data. A hypothetical engagement that shows how Kelly would approach the problem. The skills are hers; the engagement is made up.
The scenario
- A founder-run pool and spa service company with 16 people and three service crews (illustrative).
- Every non-routine quote, schedule change and unhappy-customer call goes to the founder.
- Pricing lives in the founder’s head. The office quotes from a sheet that is “mostly right.”
- The founder is the only person with full access to the accounting system and the bank.
- The two crew leads were promoted from the field and have no written authority.
The ask: “I want to take a real week off without my phone, and I want to know what breaks first.”
The approach
- Start with the decisions, not the org chart: log every decision that reaches the founder.
- Sort each one: keep with the founder, delegate with a limit, or turn into a rule.
- Map key-person risk by function and give single points of failure a backup first.
- Capture knowledge in the smallest useful form.
- Move decisions down one rung at a time and write the limits down.
- Test with a planned week off before anyone has to rely on it.
Deliverables
- Decision inventory
- Key-person risk map by function
- Knowledge map
- Delegation ladder and decision-rights chart
- Backup plan for each critical function
- Week-off test plan and 90-day plan
What is real here
Kelly has been the operating partner to business owners, written SOPs, trained teams, defined system-access procedures and co-founded and ran a business of her own. The company, engagement, data and findings are fictional.
Service path: Systems Setup and Cleanup
Related: Growing a contractor business
The storyboard
Brightwater Pool & Spa Service (fictional) · Illustrative data. Images are 16:9 slides from the sample project.
More projects
SOP Development and Operations Playbook
A playbook people use, not a folder of documents.
Bring me the problem
Have a problem like this one?
Book the free 15-Minute Systems Fit Call. I learn what you need and how you want to solve it, tell you whether and how I can help, and if it is a fit you get a fixed-scope proposal.